First off, all the awesome graphics are Oryx's. He's been putting a lot of effort into getting all the designs and UI to feel harmonious, and it's been a pleasure to see him in action.

Despite my usual leanings toward the visual side of things, I'm doing the programming this time around. And I'm trying not to backseat drive in the art department. I shall allow Oryx to be the judge of whether or not I am succeeding .

Our roles overlap a lot in other areas. Design is very much a 50 / 50 split, and we're both noodling around with sound and overall visual esthetics. Progress has been steady. We began making this 12 days ago, and are currently approaching our first decently playable build. We shall post more soon!

Today I'm starting to implement character classes, and getting some of the UI for the game working. The game is very light on statistics, so we're considering clean, simple ways to give each class a unique personality.

We also did a fireball effect for one of the items. This item is a single use projectile attack, which snakes down corridors, exploring them and revealing traps.

I should probably take this opportunity to explain the light system in the game. Light is one of the core mechanics. Every tile starts in the darkness. Scattered around the map, however, are items which magically illuminate tiles. Monsters are not very happy when this happens! In fact, magic light turns monsters into harmless (and healthy) rutabagas. Light also reveals traps.

We've got quite quite a few different mazes in the game, each with its own unique appearance and focus. Some of these are more puzzle-like than others. For instance we have one maze which has an abundance of thieves in it, and the challenge is to find a key and make it back to the exit without it being stolen along the way.

Today, what I'm doing is giving some thought to how to link all these levels together. We've begun experimenting with a forking level structure, which will allow us to pick which levels we play on our path through the game. We're also thinking about small tangential secret areas (shortcuts or warp zones come to mind as well). The goal is to make the game a bit mysterious, and create a fair amount of interesting optional content to explore.

Are the levels automatically generated ala nethack, or are they being custom made?

They are procedurally generated like a roguelike, with parameters that allow us to customize the play experience - types of enemies, number of traps, etc. These are broken into distinct themes as well that allow us to customize the visuals and gameplay experience to match.